SAN DIEGO — Collecting cancer cells from patients and growing them into 3-D mini tumors could make it possible to quickly screen large numbers of potential drugs for ultra-rare cancers. Preliminary success with a new high-speed, high-volume approach is already guiding treatment decisions for some patients with recurring hard-to-treat cancers.

For roughly six months, fully functioning pig hearts beat inside the chests of two Anubis baboons. Genetic modifications to the pig hearts along with a new transplant technique are credited with the longest-yet survival after such a transplant, researchers report December 5 in Nature. Previously, the longest a baboon lived after such a procedure was 57 days.

Each bandage is a thin film that oozes a cocktail of molecules to heal tissue damaged during a heart attack. In experiments with rats and pigs, these patches helped minimize scarring and preserve the heart’s ability to pump blood, researchers report online November 28 in Science Advances. Such devices could someday curb...

A new cryptographic system could allow pharmaceutical companies and academic labs to work together to develop new medications more quickly — without revealing any confidential data to their competitors.

The centerpiece of this computing system is an artificial intelligence program known as a neural network. The AI studies information about which drugs interact with various proteins in...

An ultraviolet glow spotted by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft may signal a hydrogen wall that separates the solar system from the rest of the Milky Way galaxy, Lisa Grossman reported in “New Horizons may have seen a glow at the solar system’s edge” (SN: 9/15/18, p. 10).

Online reader RayRay wondered if researchers could see similar walls at the edges of other solar...

Think of tissues as mosh pits of cells. The cells may not be able to crowd surf, but they can jam.

Specifically, cells can undergo a jamming transition, a physical role change that was previously known to occur only among foams, sand and other nonliving materials. It’s one of the ways that physicist Lisa Manning has shown how...

A new molecule can kill deadly strains of common bacteria, such as Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumonia, that are resistant to most existing antibiotics. The drug works differently from currently available antibiotics, potentially making it harder for bacteria to develop resistance, researchers report September 12 in Nature.

Experimental anticancer drugs may help protect against liver damage caused by acetaminophen overdoses.

In mice poisoned with the common painkiller, the drugs prevented liver cells from entering a sort of pre-death state known as senescence. The drugs also widened the treatment window: Mice need to get the drug doctors currently use to counteract an overdose within four hours or they will...

A Nobel Prize–winning discovery — that small double-stranded RNA molecules can silence genes by interrupting the translation of DNA’s instructions into proteins — is finally delivering on its medical promise.

The first drug that takes advantage of this natural biological process, called RNA interference, was approved August 10 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It targets a rare...